Pastor Elaine Thurston here. I want to tell you about a meeting that happens in a lot of our churches, and then I want to walk through the document that should come out of it.

It is a Tuesday evening in the fellowship hall. The finance committee has the year-end statement spread across the table. The endowment’s market value is $412,000. The operating budget is $206,000. The endowment is, for the first time anyone can remember, twice the budget. Someone says what everyone is thinking: We have all this money sitting there. Why are we arguing about the roof?

That is the right question. It is also the question that has split more congregations than any theological dispute I know of. And the answer is not a number. The answer is a document.

The document at the center of the table

Before the board votes on a spending rate, it needs to read the gift instruments. Not the fund summary the treasurer keeps in a spreadsheet. The actual instruments: the will, the trust agreement, the deed of gift, the letter the donor wrote in 1978 that the church secretary typed up and filed in a manila folder.

This matters because the legal structure of an endowment is not “the church’s money.” Under the prudent-management framework that most states have adopted in some form, endowment assets are donor-restricted until the board formally appropriates them for expenditure. The New York Attorney General’s guide to that state’s law puts it plainly: “Unless stated otherwise in the gift instrument, the assets in an endowment fund are donor-restricted assets (i.e., may not be spent) until they are ‘appropriated for expenditure’ by the institution.” (N.Y. Office of the Attorney General, A Practical Guide to the New York Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act, p. 3.)

I am using New York’s guide because it is the most detailed public explanation of the uniform law I could retrieve, and because it lays out the board’s obligations in plain English. North Carolina’s statute is the one that governs a Western North Carolina church, and I have not retrieved its text. Do not treat anything below as legal advice for your state. Treat it as a checklist for the conversation you need to have with a lawyer and with your board.

The point stands across state lines: the gift instrument is the first document. A board that has not read it is not in a position to invoke the founder’s name, for a higher draw or against one.

Two questions, not one

Most board arguments about the endowment conflate two separate questions.

Question one: What may the board appropriate? This is governed by state prudent-management law. The law gives the board authority, but it also imposes a process. The board must act in good faith, with the care of an ordinarily prudent person, and must consider a list of factors if they are relevant. New York’s list, which is a useful template even where it is not binding, includes the duration and preservation of the fund, the purposes of the institution and the fund, general economic conditions, inflation or deflation, expected total return, other resources of the institution, alternatives to expenditure, and the institution’s investment policy. (NY AG guide, pp. 3–4.)

Question two: What did the donor restrict? This is governed by the gift instrument. A donor may have given the principal to the church outright, or may have restricted it to a specific purpose, or may have prohibited spending below the original dollar amount. The statute does not override the instrument. It operates inside it.

When a board skips question two, it usually discovers the problem later, at the worst possible moment — when a family member asks to see the paperwork, or when the church wants to sell a piece of property and the title search turns up a restriction nobody remembered.

What the board must actually do

Here is where the conversation gets practical. The law does not just ask the board to reach a prudent conclusion. It asks the board to show its work.

New York’s guide states: “An institution must make a contemporaneous record of the consideration it gave to each of the factors in deciding to appropriate. If the institution decides to accumulate rather than appropriate from an endowment fund, it must also keep a record of such action.” (NY AG guide, p. 4.)

That word — contemporaneous — is the one to underline. A resolution passed three years after the fact, reconstructing what the board probably thought, is not a contemporaneous record. It is a story. Boards tell stories. Courts and successors read records.

For a 50-to-300-member congregation, the practical version looks like this. At the meeting where the board sets or renews the spending rule, the clerk writes down:

• The market value of each fund and the total, as of a stated date.
• The gift instrument for each fund, by name and date, and a one-line summary of any restriction.
• The factors the board considered, in the board’s own words. Not “we reviewed the factors.” What did you actually discuss about the roof, the parsonage, the cemetery, the reserve fund?
• The formula adopted, the averaging period, and the review date.
• The vote, with the ayes and nays if anyone asks for them.

That is a page and a half. It is the cheapest insurance the church will ever buy.

The 7% number, used correctly

You will hear 7% quoted in congregational conversation as if it were a ceiling. It is not. In New York, for endowment gifts made after September 17, 2010, the law creates a rebuttable presumption of imprudence if an institution appropriates more than 7% of the fund’s fair market value, averaged over at least the preceding five years, in any year. (NY AG guide, p. 4.) The same guide notes that an appropriation of 7% or less is not presumptively prudent — the absence of a red flag is not a green light.

Two cautions. First, that presumption is New York’s, for gifts made after a specific date. It does not travel automatically to North Carolina or to a 1962 bequest. Second, even where it applies, it is a tripwire, not a target. A board proposing to go above it should be able to point to the specific factors and the specific gift instruments that justify the decision, and should record that reasoning at the time. A board that treats 7% as a ceiling has misunderstood the statute. A board that treats it as a floor has misunderstood the donor.

Rate versus formula

Here is a distinction that clears up more confusion than any other. The spending rate is a percentage. The spending formula is the rule that applies the rate to a number.

NACUBO, the association that studies endowment management, explains it this way: “Most endowment spending policies are based on a formula designed to enable spending to keep up with budget needs and inflationary pressure. While some formulas are more complex, a simple example might be: 4 percent of the average market value of the prior four quarters. In this case, 4 percent would be applied to an average endowment amount based on prior years, quarters, or something else. The spending rate is a part of the formula, established as a percentage which is then applied to the average value of the endowment.” (NACUBO, “Your Endowment Questions, Answered.”)

Why does the averaging period matter so much for a small congregation? Because a single bad year in a $400,000 portfolio can swing the draw by tens of thousands of dollars. If the board spends a flat percentage of the current balance, the roof budget moves with the stock market. If the board spends a percentage of a three-year or five-year average, the roof budget moves slowly. The formula is what keeps the annual draw steady enough to plan around.

NACUBO’s data is drawn from colleges and universities, not churches, and I am not importing their rates into your fellowship hall. What transfers is the structure: a rate, an averaging period, a review date, and a written record.

What the founders would recognize

I want to be careful here, because this is where pastors and boards can slide into sentimentality. We do not know what the founders would have wanted in 2026. They did not anticipate 2026. What we know is what they wrote down.

NACUBO’s explainer makes the point in the higher-education context: “True endowments belong to the institution in perpetuity for the purpose to which they were entrusted. This means that the endowment is held for mission-related activities defined in the donor’s agreement with the institution. The board of trustees is responsible for ensuring the endowment is managed to meet those demands.” (NACUBO.)

Read that again with a small-church eye. The endowment is held for the purpose to which it was entrusted. The board’s job is to ensure it is managed to meet those demands. The founders’ intent is not a mood to be guessed at. It is a document to be read. A spending rule the founders would recognize is one that can be traced, line by line, back to the instruments they signed.

That is also the rule that will survive the board that wrote it. A future treasurer should be able to open the file and see the formula, the averaging period, the review date, and the factors the board considered — not reverse-engineer the reasoning from a bank statement and a memory.

The real risk is drift, not a single year

For a congregation whose endowment is twice its budget, the danger is rarely one dramatic overspend. It is the slow reclassification of endowment dollars as operating dollars. The draw creeps up. The roof, then the parsonage, then the copier, then the pastor’s continuing-education line. Each year the board approves it because the budget needs it, and each year the paper trail gets thinner. Ten years later, nobody can say what the original restriction was, and the fund has become a checking account with a plaque on the wall.

A written rule with a named review date is the cheapest available defense against that drift. It does not prevent a board from spending more. It forces the board to say so out loud, on the record, with the gift instruments in front of it.

Bi-vocational pastors and volunteer treasurers are the most exposed here, because they often inherit a spending practice with no paper trail at all. The first useful act is not to change the number. It is to write down the number currently being used and the reasoning behind it, so the next conversation starts from a document rather than a memory.

An illustration, clearly labeled

I am not describing a real church. This is a constructed example to show the process.

Suppose a 180-member congregation has a $400,000 endowment and a $200,000 budget. The board discovers it has been drawing 9% for three years with no recorded deliberation. The remedy is not necessarily to cut to 4% overnight — that could close the food pantry and end the pastor’s health insurance in the same month. The remedy is to adopt a formula, record the factors, and set a glide path with a review date. Maybe the board adopts a 5% rate on a three-year average, with a written plan to step down one point per year and a review at the next annual meeting. Maybe it decides the current draw is defensible for one more year because of a specific capital need, and records why. Either way, the board has done what the law asks and what the founders’ documents permit. The number is a decision. The record is the accountability.

The resolution itself

What should the motion say? Keep it short enough to read aloud and specific enough to survive you.

1. The formula. “The board adopts a spending rate of X% applied to the average market value of the endowment funds over the preceding N quarters, calculated as of [date].”
2. The funds covered. Name each fund and attach the gift instrument summary. If a fund is excluded because of a restriction, say so.
3. The factors considered. A short paragraph in the board’s own words, addressing the relevant items from your state’s list. Attach the finance committee’s one-page memo if there is one.
4. The review date. A specific month and year. Not “annually.” A date.
5. The record. Direct the clerk to file the resolution, the fund summary, the gift instrument summaries, and the finance committee memo together in the permanent record, and to note the location in the minutes.

Then file it where the next board can find it. Not in the treasurer’s home office. Not in a folder labeled “misc.” In the church’s permanent record, with a copy in the safe and a note in the minutes saying where it is.

What this does not solve

I want to be honest about the limits. A written spending rule does not settle the argument about whether to build the addition. It does not tell you whether the endowment should fund the pastor’s salary or only the mission line. It does not resolve the family that has held the treasurer’s chair for thirty years and regards the endowment as its own. Those are relational questions, and they are older than the statute.

What the rule does is give the board a place to stand. When the argument comes — and it will — the board can point to a document rather than a memory. It can say: here is what the founders wrote, here is what the law requires us to consider, here is what we decided and why, and here is when we will look at it again.

That is not a triumphal ending. It is a working document. In a small church, a working document is a form of grace.

Questions readers ask

Does this apply to our church in North Carolina? The general framework — donor-restricted funds, board appropriation, a duty to consider factors and keep a record — is the shape of the uniform prudent-management law that most states have adopted in some form. But the specific factors, the 7% presumption, and the notice requirements I quoted are New York’s. North Carolina’s statute is the one that governs you, and I have not retrieved its text. Ask a North Carolina attorney who works with churches before you vote.

Our endowment is small. Do we still need a written rule? Yes, and for the same reason. The smaller the fund, the easier it is for a single year’s draw to look like a rounding error and the harder it is to reconstruct later. A one-page resolution is enough.

What if we cannot find the gift instruments? Then the first task is a search, not a vote. Look in the church safe, the former treasurer’s files, the donor’s family papers, the county deed records if real property is involved, and the church’s own minutes from the year of the gift. If the instrument truly cannot be found, the board should record that fact and get legal advice before appropriating. Do not assume the restriction is gone because the paper is lost.

Can we spend below the original gift amount? In New York, the law now permits it if the board concludes it is prudent, subject to donor notice rules for older gifts. (NY AG guide, pp. 2–4.) Your state may differ. The gift instrument may also prohibit it. Read the instrument first.

Who decides — the board or the congregation? That depends on your bylaws and your state’s nonprofit corporation law. In many congregational settings the board or trustees hold the authority to appropriate, while the congregation holds authority over the budget. The spending rule should be adopted by whichever body the bylaws name, and the other body should be told in writing what was adopted. If the bylaws are silent, that silence is itself a document problem worth fixing.

What about the 7% figure — is that a safe ceiling? No. In New York it is a rebuttable presumption of imprudence above 7% for certain gifts, and the guide explicitly says 7% or less is not presumptively prudent. It is a tripwire, not a target, and it is not a North Carolina rule unless your statute says so.

Sources

• New York State Office of the Attorney General, Charities Bureau, A Practical Guide to the New York Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act. https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2023-02/mismanagement-funds.pdf
• NACUBO, “Your Endowment Questions, Answered” (2025 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments). https://www.nacubo.org/topics/endowment-management/your-endowment-questions-answered

Note on scope: The statutory details quoted above are from New York’s version of the uniform law. North Carolina’s statute was not retrieved for this article. The NACUBO material concerns college and university endowments and is cited for the structure of a spending formula, not for a recommended rate for congregations.

I keep a folder of photographs of church signs, bulletin covers, and children’s curriculum art. Not to mock them. To study them. The way a congregation pictures Jesus for its youngest members is a theological statement, whether anyone intended it or not. So when I saw this shirt, I stopped at the lettering.

The design reads JESUS IS MY SUPERHERO in comic-style letters, and beside the words is a gold cross wearing a red cape. That is the whole graphic. No scripture reference, no church name, no dove or lion. Just the claim and the cape.

I want to be careful here, because I am not a historian of children’s media and I am not going to pretend to know where the superhero framing came from or who first put a cape on a cross. What I can say is what the artwork does: it takes the central symbol of our faith, the instrument of execution that became the sign of victory, and dresses it in the costume of a comic-book hero. The cross is not merely gold and decorative. It is wearing a cape. It is, in the visual grammar of the shirt, about to do something.

The claim is not the problem

Some pastors I know would flinch at this shirt. Superhero language feels thin to them, a consumer culture borrowing that flattens the cross into a logo. I understand the instinct. But I think the flinch misses what the shirt is actually claiming. The words do not say Jesus is a superhero, one option among many. They say Jesus is my superhero. That is a possessive claim, a personal one, and it is closer to the language of the Psalms than we might expect. My rock. My fortress. My deliverer. The child wearing this shirt is not making a systematic argument. They are saying: this one is mine, and this one saves.

The cape is where I want to spend the most time, because the cape is the part that could go wrong. A cape is a costume element. It signals flight, rescue, power. If we are not careful, we hand children a Jesus who swoops in, fixes the problem, and leaves, which is not the Jesus of the Gospels. But look again at what the cape is attached to. It is attached to the cross. The shirt does not put a cape on a muscular figure or a smiling face. It puts the cape on the instrument of suffering. That is a strange and, I think, theologically interesting choice. The power being celebrated is the power that went through the cross, not the power that avoided it.

What a volunteer team should actually discuss

If a children’s ministry team is considering this shirt, or something like it, the conversation worth having is not about whether superhero imagery is appropriate. That debate tends to stall in taste. The better question is: what are we teaching children about what a hero does?

In the comic-book grammar most children absorb, a hero wins by force, by cleverness, by being stronger than the villain. The cross does not work that way. The cross is a hero who loses, and then wins by a means no one expected. If we hand a child a shirt that says Jesus is their superhero, we are borrowing a vocabulary they already know. That is not a bad thing. But it means the adults around them have a job: to fill that vocabulary with the right content. The cape on the cross is a good start. It puts the symbol of weakness at the center of the symbol of power. A volunteer team could ask, in a single meeting, what else we are doing to make that connection clear. Not a curriculum overhaul. One conversation.

There is also the matter of the child’s own identity. A shirt like this is worn in public. It is a small, ordinary act of testimony. A child in a grocery store or a school hallway is not preaching. They are simply wearing a claim. That is worth naming to parents and volunteers: the shirt is not a lesson. It is a label. The lesson happens when someone asks about it, and the child either has words or does not. The shirt creates the occasion. The church and the family supply the words.

The gold cross and the red cape

I keep coming back to the colors. Gold for the cross, red for the cape. Gold is the color of something precious, something set apart. Red is the color of blood and of the comic-book hero’s cape. Put together, they say something the words alone do not: this is precious, and this is costly. I do not know if the designer intended that. I am reading the image, not the intent. But that is what the image offers a congregation willing to look at it closely.

The shirt is sold as Jesus Is My Superhero Christian Kids Girls Boys Faith by Quirky Cotton Collective. It is a children’s typography shirt, and the design is exactly what I have described: the comic lettering, the gold cross, the red cape. Nothing more. That simplicity is part of its usefulness. There is not much to explain. There is only the claim and the symbol, and the question of what we do with them.

One question back to you

If a child in your congregation wore this shirt to worship on Sunday, what would you want them to be able to say if another child asked them what the cape was for? That is the question I would put to a volunteer team this month. Not whether the shirt is good or bad. What words we are putting in the child’s mouth. Because the shirt will do its work either way. The only question is whether we have done ours.

Note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. This is not an independent review.

The shirt reads THANKFUL GRATEFUL BLESSED in stacked lettering, and wheat stalks rise alongside the words. That is the whole design. No verse reference, no cross, no church name. Just three adjectives and a grain.

I keep looking at the wheat. It is the part of the design that does the real work, and it is the part a volunteer team is most likely to skip past on the way to arguing about the words.

Three words that are not the same word

We use thankful, grateful, and blessed as if they were interchangeable, the way we use fellowship and potluck. They are not interchangeable, and the design puts them in a column, which is a quiet argument that they belong in an order.

Thankful is the easiest. It is a disposition toward a specific thing: the casserole that showed up, the deacon who fixed the furnace, the visitor who came back twice. Thankfulness has an object. You can name it at a board meeting.

Grateful carries a little more weight. It implies a giver, not just a gift. In the Appalachian church I serve, gratitude is what we feel toward the woman who has kept the roll for forty years, and it is also what we owe her when we finally ask someone else to keep it. Gratitude has a direction.

Blessed is the word that gets us into trouble. In common usage it slides toward fortunate – blessed with health, blessed with a good crop, blessed with a building that does not leak. That is not wrong, exactly, but it is thin. The older sense is not about circumstances at all. It is about being claimed. A blessed people is a people who have been spoken over, whether or not the roof holds.

So the shirt is not three synonyms. It is a small progression: I have received something. I know who gave it. I belong to the one who gave it. That is a better sermon than most of us will preach in November.

Why the wheat matters

Wheat is not a Thanksgiving decoration. It is a harvest image, and harvest images in Scripture are almost never about abundance for its own sake. They are about separation and gathering – the wheat kept, the chaff burned, the field white for harvest, the bread broken. Wheat has to be cut, threshed, ground, and baked before it feeds anybody. Nothing about the plant is passive.

I am not claiming the designer had any of that in mind. I am telling you what the image does when it sits next to those three words. It turns a pleasant autumn slogan into a claim about process. The blessing on the shirt is not the blessing of a full barn. It is the blessing of a field that has been worked.

That distinction matters for a volunteer team in a small church, because most of our people are tired. They have been cutting and threshing for years. If the only language we give them is blessed in the sense of fortunate, we are telling them that their labor is a lifestyle accessory. If we give them the wheat, we are telling them that the labor is the point.

What I would actually do with this shirt

I would not put it on a table at the fall festival and call it outreach. A shirt is not a program. But I would use the design as a discussion prompt with the people who already show up – the ones who will be setting up tables and washing dishes and counting the offering on the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Here is the conversation I would have, and I would have it in the fellowship hall with coffee, not in a classroom with a handout.

First, ask each person to name one thing they are thankful for this year that cost somebody else something. Not a general blessing. A specific cost. The trustee who crawled under the building. The pianist who learned a new song at seventy-eight. The treasurer who found the insurance error before the renewal. Thankfulness with an object is a discipline, and naming the cost is what keeps it from becoming sentiment.

Second, ask who they are grateful to, and whether that person knows it. This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable, because gratitude that stays in the heart is not gratitude; it is a pleasant feeling. The wheat has to be cut. Somebody has to write the note, make the call, or say the thing out loud in the business meeting. I have watched more church conflict start from unspoken gratitude than from almost any other source. People who are never thanked begin to believe they are not seen, and people who believe they are not seen begin to keep score.

Third, ask what blessed means to them when the year has been bad. This is the question that separates the shirt from a greeting card. If blessed means fortunate, then a bad year means God withheld something. If blessed means claimed, then a bad year means the claim still stands. I have sat with too many small-church saints who quietly believe the first thing and have never been given permission to say the second.

That is a forty-five minute conversation, and it does not require a curriculum, a budget line, or a single purchase. The shirt is on the table because it is a useful object to point at, not because it is the point.

The tradeoff

The cost of this conversation is honesty, and honesty is expensive in a small church. If you ask people to name what they are grateful for and who they are grateful to, you will hear things you did not plan to hear. You will hear about the funeral nobody attended. You will hear about the deacon who was pushed out in 2019. You will hear about the family that stopped coming and was never called.

I would rather hear those things in November than in a business meeting in March. The wheat gets cut either way. The question is whether it gets gathered or left to rot in the field.

If you want the shirt itself, it is the Thankful Grateful Blessed Christian Thanksgiving Fall design from Sunday Field, printed with the three words and the wheat stalks. I am not telling you it will change your church. I am telling you it is a decent place to start a conversation that might.

One question back to you

When your people say blessed this November, do they mean fortunate or do they mean claimed? And if you are not sure, what would it take to find out before the year ends?

Across the front of the shirt, in block letters, run the words GOD SAYS I AM. Beneath them sits a cross, and around it the identity words LOVED, CHOSEN, FORGIVEN, STRONG, and HIS. That is the whole design. No verse reference, no church name, no decorative vine. Just a claim, a cross, and five words that a person could read in a checkout line before they read the face wearing it.

I want to be careful about what that design does and does not do. It does not teach. It does not disciple anyone by itself. A shirt is not a curriculum, and the fact that a phrase is printed in a font does not make it a doctrinal statement. What it does is put a sentence in public where sentences usually are not: on a body, in a room, at a time when nobody asked for a sermon. That is a small thing, and small things have a way of becoming the vocabulary a congregation reaches for when it is tired.

Here is the argument I want to make to a volunteer team, and it is not about whether anyone should buy the shirt. It is about the order of the words. God says comes first. I am comes second. That order is the whole thing, and it is the thing we most often reverse in practice.

What the design actually puts in front of a reader

The phrase is a list, and lists invite a particular kind of reading. A person scanning it will likely catch one word before the others. Which word they catch depends on the week they have had. A woman who has spent three years forgiving a family member may see FORGIVEN and stop there. A man who has been told by a doctor, a boss, or a deacon that he is not enough may see STRONG and feel the gap between the word and his Tuesday. Someone who has been on the outside of a church fight may see CHOSEN and flinch, because chosen has been used in that congregation as a weapon rather than a gift.

That is not a flaw in the design. It is how printed words work. The shirt does not control which word lands. It only puts the list where a person can find it. The cross in the middle is the only visual anchor, and it is doing the theological work the words cannot do alone: it locates the claim. These are not affirmations a person generates about herself in a mirror. They are statements attributed to God, hung on the shape of the crucifixion. Whether the wearer can articulate that distinction is a separate question. The design at least leaves the door open.

I have seen enough church merchandise to know the difference between a shirt that shouts a slogan and a shirt that hands someone a sentence. This one is closer to the second. It is quiet enough to be read at close range and plain enough that a child could sound it out. That matters more than it sounds like it matters. A design that requires a seminary footnote to interpret is not a design that will travel into a grocery store aisle.

The reversal we practice without noticing

Most of us who lead volunteers have a functional order that runs the other way. We ask people to be strong so that God can use them. We ask them to forgive so that they can be forgiven. We ask them to prove they are chosen by showing up, giving more, serving harder. It is rarely stated that baldly, but the operational theology of a small church under strain tends toward I am, therefore God says. The shirt puts the arrow back the right direction, and that is worth a conversation at the next volunteer meeting that has nothing to do with the shirt.

I am not suggesting a teaching series. I am suggesting one question, asked plainly, in a room with folding chairs and a coffee pot that has been on since seven: When we hand someone a job in this church, what are we telling them about who they are before they do it? That question will surface more than a sermon will. It will surface the nursery worker who believes she is loved only when the room is clean. It will surface the trustee who believes he is chosen because his family name is on the deed. It will surface the treasurer who believes she is forgiven only after the books balance. The list on the shirt is not the problem. The list we have quietly substituted for it is.

What a volunteer team can do with five words

I want to propose something modest and specific, because vague exhortations are the reason volunteer meetings run long and change nothing. Take the five words as printed, and ask your team to do one exercise with them over the next month. Not a study. Not a curriculum. A single sheet of paper.

On the left side of the page, write the five words: loved, chosen, forgiven, strong, his. On the right side, write the name of one person in the congregation who, in your observation, is living as though that word were not true of them. Do not write a diagnosis. Do not write a plan. Just a name. Then, at the next meeting, ask each volunteer to name one ordinary act of service they could offer that person in the coming month that assumes the word is true rather than demanding the person prove it. A phone call. A ride. A casserole with no card attached. A shift covered without a lecture.

The cost of this is small and real. It will take about forty minutes of meeting time and it will produce some awkward silence, because naming a person is harder than naming a principle. It may also produce a conflict or two, because the person someone names may be the person someone else is angry at. That is not a failure of the exercise. That is the exercise working. The words on the shirt are not abstractions, and the moment you attach them to a name they stop being decorative.

The cross in the middle is doing something

I keep coming back to the placement of the cross. It sits between the claim and the list, or among the words, depending on how the printer laid it out. Either way, it is not a decorative flourish. It is the visual argument that the list is not a set of personality traits but a set of verdicts rendered at a particular place and time. Forgiven is not a feeling. It is a sentence pronounced. Chosen is not a compliment. It is an election. Strong is not a fitness goal. It is a description of what a person has been given, not what a person has mustered.

If your team talks about the shirt at all, that is the distinction worth making. The world will read the list as self-help. The cross insists it is something else. A volunteer who understands that difference will hand the words to people differently. She will stop saying you just need to believe you are loved and start saying here is what God has said, and here is what it cost him to say it. That is a different sentence, and it is the one the shirt is pointing toward, however quietly.

If you want to see the exact design for yourself, the listing is here: God Says I Am Loved Chosen Forgiven Strong Christian. I am not telling you to buy it. I am telling you that the words on it are worth a conversation your team has not had yet.

The question I would leave with you

Here is the one I keep circling. If a person in your congregation wore this shirt into the fellowship hall on a Wednesday night, would the way your team treats her make the words easier or harder to believe? That is not a question about the shirt. It is a question about the room. The shirt only makes the question visible.

Disclosure: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

On the front of the shirt, the words MADE TO WORSHIP are set in a bold, blocky lettering, and beneath them two hands are raised, palms open, fingers spread. At the bottom, in smaller type, the reference Psalm 95:6 is printed. That is the whole design: a claim, a gesture, and a citation. No verse text, no church logo, no decorative border. The shirt is sold under the brand Sunday Field and is titled Made to Worship Psalm 95:6 Christian Praise and Worship. You can see the listing here.

I want to take the design at its word. The phrase made to worship is a statement about purpose, and the raised hands are a statement about posture. The printed reference is a statement about source. Put together, they ask a question that a volunteer team can actually sit with: what are we doing when we raise our hands in this room, and who told us to?

The claim on the shirt is not a slogan about feeling

Plenty of worship-themed shirts lean on atmosphere. They print a lyric, a mountain range, a font that looks like a concert poster. This one is plainer than that. Made to worship is a creation claim before it is a music claim. It says that worship is not a style we prefer or a mood we chase; it is a purpose we were built for. The raised hands are the visual argument: a body doing what it was made to do.

That is a useful distinction for a small church because it moves the conversation away from taste. In a 90-member congregation, the worship conversation is often really a volume conversation, or a song-selection conversation, or a why did we stop singing that one conversation. Those are real conversations, and they matter. But the shirt’s claim sits underneath them. If we are made to worship, then the question is not first did I like it but did I bring myself.

Psalm 95:6 is a call to a posture, not a proof text for a style

The reference printed on the shirt points to a verse that reads, in the King James my grandmother carried, O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker. I am quoting it here because the shirt cites it, not because the shirt prints it. The design gives you the address; the address gives you the posture. Bow down. Kneel. The hands on the shirt are raised, but the verse behind them is on its knees.

That is the tension I find most useful in the design. Raised hands and bowed knees are not the same gesture, and a small church can hold both. Some of our people raise their hands without embarrassment. Some of them would sooner mow the cemetery in July than lift a palm in the third row. The shirt does not settle that argument. It just puts the two postures in the same frame and lets the verse do the correcting. Worship is not one gesture. It is a body answering its maker.

What a volunteer team can do with this before Sunday

I am not going to pretend I wore the shirt to a board meeting and watched it change the room. I did not. What I can offer is a conversation a worship committee, a deacon board, or a Sunday school class could actually have, using the shirt as the object on the table.

First, name the gestures your room already has. Every congregation has a physical vocabulary, whether or not anyone planned it. Some stand for the reading. Some bow their heads at the invitation. Some fold their hands and some spread them. Ask the team: what do our bodies do here, and what do we wish they did? The shirt’s raised hands are one answer, not the only one.

Second, separate the purpose from the preference. The phrase made to worship is a purpose claim. A song is a preference. A team that can say we were made for this can disagree about the third verse without treating the disagreement as a spiritual failure. That is worth saying out loud in a small church, where the same eight people lead worship, run the soundboard, and count the offering.

Third, let the reference do some teaching. Psalm 95:6 is short enough to read in a meeting and specific enough to argue with. Kneel before the LORD our maker. Ask the team what kneeling would look like in your building, literally or otherwise. You may find that the most worshipful thing a tired volunteer team can do is stop standing and sit down together for ten minutes.

The shirt is ordinary, and that is the point

A printed t-shirt is not a liturgical garment. It is cotton and ink, and it will fade. But that is exactly why it is worth thinking about. Most of the people in your pews will not read a book on worship this year. They will wear a shirt to the grocery store. The words on it will be seen by a cashier, a neighbor, a grandchild in the back seat. The shirt’s claim is public before it is private.

That raises a question a small-church leader can ask without turning it into a lecture: what does our clothing say we are made for? Not in a legalistic way. Not as a dress code. But as a matter of honesty. If we are made to worship, then the words on our chest and the posture of our hands and the way we treat the person bagging groceries are all part of the same witness. The shirt just makes the claim visible.

One question back to you

If you put this shirt in front of your worship team on a Wednesday night and asked them to name one gesture your congregation already offers to God without being told, what would they say? And what would they say you are missing?

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

On the shirt, the words run in a clean block: TEACHING IS MY MINISTRY. Beneath or beside them, depending on the print, sits a simple apple and the reference Romans 12:7. That is the whole design. No slogan, no extra verse, no decorative border. The apple does the cultural work of signaling a classroom; the lettering does the theological work of naming the work a ministry; the reference points to a specific text.

I want to take the shirt at its word. Not as a slogan to admire, but as a claim a volunteer team could actually argue about for an hour and come out better for it.

Romans 12:7 is part of Paul’s longer list of gifts in the body of Christ. The verse names teaching as one of the ways grace shows up in a congregation: if your gift is teaching, teach. The shirt takes that sentence and applies it to the person standing in front of a Sunday school class, a Wednesday night Bible study, a GED cohort in the fellowship hall, or a room of third graders who are not listening. The apple is not a theological symbol. It is a piece of shorthand that says: this person works in a school.

That combination is worth noticing. Most faith-themed clothing I see in church parking lots leans toward invitation or encouragement: a verse about strength, a phrase about hope, a cross with a sunrise behind it. This one is different. It is a job description. It says this is the work I do, and I am calling it ministry. That is a more interesting claim than it first appears, and it raises a question a volunteer team could use.

The claim the shirt makes

The shirt does not say teaching is my job. It says ministry. In a small congregation, that word gets used loosely. We call the coffee pot a ministry. We call the parking lot attendants a ministry. Sometimes that is generous and true; sometimes it is a way of making volunteers feel better about tasks nobody wants. The shirt asks the wearer to make a distinction. Is the classroom a ministry because it is church work, or is it a ministry because of what happens in the room?

I think the shirt is making the second claim. The apple is not a church symbol. It is a school symbol. The design puts the two together and lets the wearer carry both into the same week. That is a useful thing for a volunteer team to talk about, because most of the people in your pews spend more hours in a school building than they do in yours.

What a team could do with it

If I were sitting down with a Christian education committee or a group of Sunday school teachers, I would use the shirt as a conversation starter, not a uniform. I would put it on the table and ask three questions.

First: who in this room teaches outside these walls? Not just schoolteachers. Sunday school teachers, small group leaders, literacy volunteers, people who train new employees at the plant, people who teach a Sunday school class of two. The shirt names teaching as a ministry, and that gives permission for the people who do it to say so out loud. A team that never names its teachers will never know who is burning out.

Second: what does Romans 12:7 ask of us that we are not doing? The verse is not a compliment. It is an instruction. If teaching is a gift, then the congregation has a responsibility to make room for it, to train for it, and to let the people who have it actually use it. That might mean buying curriculum. It might mean paying for a background check. It might mean moving the Wednesday night class to a time when the teachers can actually come. The shirt is cheap. The obedience is not.

Third: what would it look like to treat the classroom as seriously as the sanctuary? In most small churches, the sanctuary gets the new carpet and the classroom gets the leftover chairs. The shirt does not solve that. But it names the work, and naming is the first step toward budgeting for it.

The apple and the reference

I want to be careful here. The apple is a cultural symbol, not a biblical one. It does not appear in Romans 12. It is a piece of visual shorthand that says school, and it works because we have all seen it on chalkboards and worksheets and teacher appreciation cards. The shirt is not making a theological argument with the apple. It is making a visual one: this person works in a classroom, and the classroom is where the ministry happens.

The reference is the more interesting choice. Romans 12:7 is not a verse about teachers in the way we usually mean it. It is a verse about the body of Christ, and teaching is one of the gifts listed alongside serving, encouraging, giving, leading, and showing mercy. The shirt takes a verse about the whole church and applies it to a specific job. That is a legitimate move, but it is worth saying plainly: the verse is not a license to ignore the rest of the list. If teaching is your ministry, so is showing mercy. The shirt is a starting point, not a full job description.

What the shirt is not

It is not a curriculum. It is not a training program. It is not a substitute for the harder work of recruiting, equipping, and retaining teachers in a small congregation. I have seen too many churches buy a shirt and call it a strategy. The shirt is a conversation piece. It is a way of saying out loud what a lot of teachers already believe but rarely hear named from the pulpit.

It is also not a uniform. I would not ask every teacher in the church to buy one. That turns a personal statement into a dress code, and it misses the point. The shirt works because it is a claim the wearer makes about their own work, not a label the church assigns.

The question back to you

If someone in your congregation wore this shirt to the grocery store on a Tuesday, would the people who know them understand what it meant? Would they know that the person bagging their groceries teaches a Sunday school class of six, or that the woman in the next aisle runs the after-school program at the Methodist church? The shirt is a small thing. But it names a ministry that most congregations depend on and few of us talk about plainly.

So here is the question I would bring to your next committee meeting: Who in this church is teaching, and what would it cost us to treat that work like the ministry the shirt says it is?

This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. The shirt described here is available at this Amazon listing.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. This is not an independent review.

The shirt reads CATCH UP WITH JESUS, set in a curve around a red ketchup bottle and two tomatoes. That is the whole design. No verse reference, no cross, no church name. Just a condiment and a pun, and the words doing the work of an invitation.

I want to take it seriously, because I think it is doing something more interesting than it looks. The phrase is a collision. “Catch up” is what you say to a friend you have not seen in a while, and it is also what you say to someone who has fallen behind. “With Jesus” is the language of discipleship, of walking alongside, of a relationship that has a direction. Put them together and you get a sentence that can mean let’s talk about where you are with him or you are behind and you need to close the gap. The ketchup bottle tilts the whole thing toward the first reading. It is a joke, and the joke is doing theological work: it lowers the stakes of the invitation without emptying it.

That is the argument I want to make to a volunteer team. Most of our invitations are too heavy or too light. Too heavy looks like a tract left on a diner table with the check. Too light looks like a church sign with a smiley face and no address. This shirt sits in the middle. It is silly enough that a stranger will ask about it, and specific enough that the answer has a name in it.

What the design actually does

Look at the layout. The words wrap the bottle rather than sitting above it. That means the bottle is not an illustration of the slogan; the slogan is a caption for the bottle. The eye goes to the red shape first, then reads around it. Two tomatoes sit at the base, which is a small visual joke of its own: ketchup comes from tomatoes, and the pun comes from ketchup. The whole thing is a closed loop of reference. It is clever in the way a good bulletin-board cartoon is clever, and it does not pretend to be more than that.

I am not making a historical claim about where the pun began. I do not know, and I am not going to guess. What I can say is that the design treats the phrase as a common property, the way a church treats a hymn text: the words are not owned by any one congregation, and the arrangement is what makes them land. The retail listing calls it a “funny Christian pun,” and that is accurate as far as it goes. But a pun is not just a joke. A pun is a way of holding two meanings at once and letting the hearer choose. That is a useful thing for a volunteer team to practice.

The invitation problem

Here is the tradeoff I keep running into. The people who most need an invitation are often the ones most suspicious of it. They have been invited before, by a billboard or a stranger or a cousin who meant well, and the invitation came with a price tag attached. So when we hand them something with a ketchup bottle on it, we are making a bet: that the humor will get past the suspicion before the words get to the heart.

That bet costs something. It costs dignity, a little. Some people will find the shirt tacky, and they are not wrong. It costs clarity, too. A pun is not a proposition. If someone asks what it means, you have to have an answer ready, and the answer cannot be another joke. The shirt opens a door; it does not walk anybody through it. If your team is not prepared to have the conversation the shirt starts, the shirt is just a novelty, and a novelty is a poor substitute for a welcome.

I would rather a team wear this to a community yard sale than to a worship service. The yard sale is where the shirt’s logic works: you are already in a casual conversation, the stakes are low, and the question “what does your shirt say?” is a real opening rather than a forced one. In a pew, the same shirt is a performance. The setting changes the meaning, and a volunteer team should be honest about which setting it is choosing.

What I would ask the team before ordering

Not whether the shirt is funny. It is funny. The question is whether the team can answer the follow-up. I would ask three things in a Wednesday-night meeting, and I would write the answers on a whiteboard so we could see them.

First: What is our one-sentence answer when someone asks what it means? If the team cannot agree on a sentence, the shirt is not ready. The sentence does not need to be clever. It needs to be true and short enough to say while holding a plate of food.

Second: Where will we wear it, and where will we not? This is a real decision with real costs. A shirt that works at a cookout may not work at a funeral, and a team that does not make that distinction is not thinking about the people in the room.

Third: Who is the person we hope sees it? If the answer is “everybody,” the shirt is decoration. If the answer is a name, the shirt is a tool. The name is the point.

The shirt itself is a standard tee, sold under the Sunday Field brand, and you can find it at the listing here: Catch Up With Jesus Ketchup Bottle Funny Christian Pun. I am not going to tell you it will change your outreach. I am going to tell you that a shirt is a small piece of equipment, and like any equipment it is only as good as the plan around it.

The deeper question the pun asks

There is a reading of “catch up with Jesus” that I find uncomfortable, and I think the discomfort is worth naming. To “catch up” implies you are behind. It implies a race, a schedule, a standard you have not met. Some of the people in our pews, and some of the people outside them, are carrying a load of shame about exactly that. They believe they are behind, and they believe the gap is their fault. A shirt that says catch up could land on that bruise like a thumb.

The ketchup bottle is what saves it, if anything does. The bottle makes the phrase obviously a joke, and a joke gives the hearer permission to laugh instead of flinch. But a team should know that the permission is not automatic. The same words that read as playful on a thirty-year-old at a yard sale can read as a rebuke to someone who has been told their whole life that they are not enough. That is not a reason to throw the shirt away. It is a reason to be careful about who wears it and where, and to be ready to say, plainly, that the invitation is not a verdict.

I think the best use of this shirt is as a conversation starter among people who already know each other, not as a cold-contact tool. A team that wears it to its own fellowship meal is saying something to itself: we are the ones who need to catch up, too. That is a healthier posture than wearing it at strangers. The humor turns inward, and inward humor is usually kinder.

What it costs

I will not pretend the decision is free. Matching shirts cost money, and a small church’s discretionary fund is not large. The cost is not just the shirts; it is the meeting time to agree on the sentence, the awkwardness of the first wearing, and the possibility that the joke falls flat. Those are real costs, and a treasurer should see them on the same page as the purchase.

The return is not measurable in the way a budget line is measurable. It is the conversation that happens because someone asked. I cannot promise that conversation will happen. I can say that the shirt is designed to make it more likely, and that a team that has prepared its answer is in a better position than one that has not.

One question back to you

If your team wore this shirt to the next fellowship meal, what is the one sentence you would want a visitor to hear when they ask what it means? Write it down before you order. If you cannot write it, the shirt is not the problem.

Four root vegetables sit in a row, smiling up from a band of soil. A carrot, a radish, a beet, an onion. Their roots are drawn plainly, forked and fine, the way a gardener sees them when the fork turns the bed. Around them, in capital letters, runs the line: LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW.

I keep looking at the roots. Not the smiles, though they are there, and not the pun, though it is doing its work. The roots. Because the design puts the roots above the soil line, visible, on display, and that is not how roots work. A root system is the part you do not see. It is the part that holds the plant in place and pulls what it needs from ground you never inspect. The shirt makes the hidden thing visible, and that is the small theological wager I want to sit with for a few hundred words.

This is a gardening shirt. The retail listing calls it a gardening and mutual-growth pun, and the artwork bears that out: four smiling root vegetables with their roots visible in soil, the words wrapping around them. It is the kind of shirt a Sunday school teacher might wear to a spring planting day, or a deacon’s wife might wear to the community garden, or a volunteer might wear to the church workday when the beds need turning and the fellowship hall needs sweeping. The phrase is a pun on rooting for a team and rooting in soil, and it works because both meanings are true at once. You cheer for someone. You also put down roots with them. The shirt says both.

If you want to see the exact listing, it is here: Let’s Root For Each Other And Watch Each Other Grow Garden.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

What I want to say about this shirt is not that it is cute, though it is, or that it would make a good gift for the gardener in your congregation, though it might. I want to say that the shirt is making an argument about how growth actually happens in a volunteer team, and the argument is worth taking to your next committee meeting.

The roots are the part you don’t see

In a garden, the root is the infrastructure. It is the part that anchors the plant against wind and pulls water and nutrients from the soil. You can look at a tomato plant all summer and never see the root system, but the root system is why the plant is still standing in August. The visible part depends on the invisible part.

In a volunteer team, the same is true. The visible part is the Sunday school class, the potluck, the workday, the worship service. The invisible part is the Tuesday phone call, the ride to the doctor, the casserole left on the porch, the treasurer who reconciles the books at ten o’clock on a weeknight, the person who remembers that the Jones family lost their mother in March and checks in again in June. None of that shows up in the bulletin. All of it is the root system.

The shirt puts the roots on display, and I think that is the right instinct for a volunteer team. Not because we should make a show of our hidden work, but because we should name it. We should say out loud that the visible ministry depends on the invisible care. We should thank the person who made the phone call, not just the person who taught the class. We should count the casseroles, not just the attendance. The root system is the ministry.

Rooting for each other is not the same as agreeing

There is a second thing the shirt says, and it is the harder thing. “Let’s root for each other” is not a call to uniformity. It is a call to cheer for someone whose growth may look different from yours. The carrot does not grow like the beet. The radish is ready in twenty-five days; the onion takes a season. If you plant them in the same bed and expect them to mature on the same schedule, you will be disappointed, and you will blame the onion.

In a small church, this is the daily reality. The volunteer who has been teaching for thirty years and the volunteer who started last month are not on the same schedule. The member who grew up in the church and the member who walked in off the street are not on the same schedule. The treasurer who wants a spreadsheet and the deacon who wants a handwritten ledger are not on the same schedule. Rooting for each other means cheering for the growth that is actually happening, not the growth you would have scheduled.

I have watched a church split over a schedule. Not a theological dispute, not a moral failure, just a disagreement about how fast something should happen. The ones who wanted it faster saw the ones who wanted it slower as obstacles. The ones who wanted it slower saw the ones who wanted it faster as reckless. Both sides were rooting for the church. Neither side was rooting for the other. The root systems were fine. The trellis was the problem.

Watch each other grow is a commitment, not a sentiment

The second half of the line is the part I keep turning over. “Watch each other grow.” Watching is not a passive thing. It is a commitment to pay attention over time. You cannot watch a plant grow in an afternoon. You have to come back. You have to notice the new leaf, the yellowing edge, the bud that wasn’t there last week. Watching is a discipline of return.

In a volunteer team, watching each other grow means showing up for the long haul. It means noticing when the Sunday school teacher who has been faithful for a decade is tired, and asking. It means noticing when the new volunteer is ready for more responsibility, and inviting. It means noticing when the person who used to be at everything is suddenly at nothing, and going to find out why. Watching is not surveillance. It is care with a memory.

The shirt does not say “watch each other succeed.” It says grow. Growth is slower than success and harder to measure. A volunteer team that watches for growth will celebrate things that a volunteer team watching for success will miss: the shy member who prayed out loud for the first time, the teenager who showed up early to set up chairs without being asked, the treasurer who finally asked for help. Those are growth. They are worth watching for.

What the shirt is not

I want to be careful here. The shirt is a shirt. It is not a program, not a curriculum, not a five-step plan for volunteer retention. It does not cure burnout or resolve conflict or grow your church. It is a piece of clothing with a pun on it, and the pun is doing most of the work. I am not going to pretend that wearing it will change your committee meeting. I am not going to pretend that buying it will fix anything.

What I am saying is that the shirt is a useful conversation starter, and conversation starters are not nothing. A volunteer team that can look at a shirt with four smiling root vegetables and say, “That’s us, that’s what we’re trying to do,” has a shared language. Shared language is how a team holds a value when the meeting gets hard. It is how you say, “Remember the shirt,” without having to give a speech. It is how you name the thing you are trying to be.

The shirt is also a reminder that the work is ordinary. Root vegetables are not glamorous. They are the ones you pull out of the ground and brush off and put in a pot. They are the ones that feed people. A volunteer team that sees itself as root vegetables is a team that knows its work is mostly hidden, mostly ordinary, and mostly about feeding people. That is not a bad self-image for a small church.

A question for your next meeting

If you are a pastor or a lay leader reading this, here is a question you could take to your next volunteer team meeting. It does not require the shirt. It does not require a budget. It requires ten minutes and a willingness to be honest.

Who on this team is doing root work that nobody sees, and how can we name it this month?

Not “how can we reward it.” Not “how can we make it visible in the bulletin.” Just name it. Say it out loud in the meeting. Thank the person who made the phone call. Thank the person who counted the offering. Thank the person who remembered the anniversary. Thank the person who swept the fellowship hall after the potluck. The root work is the ministry. Name it, and watch what happens.

The shirt says, “Let’s root for each other and watch each other grow.” That is a good sentence for a volunteer team. It is a good sentence for a church. It is a good sentence for a season when the visible part looks small and the invisible part is carrying the load. The roots are down there. The growth is coming. Watch for it.

The shirt is not subtle. Across the chest, in bold white capital letters, it reads I HATE SATAN, with a small cross set into the design. That is the whole of it. No verse reference, no clever subversion, no soft-focus font. A declaration and a cross, and the cross is the smaller of the two marks.

I want to take that design seriously rather than either flinch from it or dress it up. Because the first thing a volunteer team will do with a shirt like this is argue about it, and the argument is worth having on purpose instead of sideways in a parking lot after the service.

Here is the object as it is sold: the I Hate Satan bold Christian faith statement cross shirt, listed under the Sunday Field brand. The printed wording is the point. Everything else about the garment is ordinary; the sentence is not.

Editorial note: this publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. This is not an independent review.

What the Words Actually Do

Most faith slogans on clothing are warm. Blessed. Rooted. Made to worship. They invite, they reassure, they open a door. This one does not open a door. It draws a line and stands on one side of it.

That is not a flaw in the design. It is the design. The grammar is first-person and present tense: I hate. Not we resist, not pray for, not light overcomes darkness. A single speaker, a single object of hatred, stated flatly. The small cross underneath is doing quiet work as the counterweight — the reason the hatred is not free-floating resentment but something aimed at the thing the cross is understood to have defeated. Whether a given wearer reads it that way is not something I can verify from a product page, and I won’t pretend to.

What I can say is that the visual hierarchy matters. The words are large and white and central. The cross is small. A designer could have reversed that. Whoever made this chose to let the sentence carry the weight and the symbol sign it. That is a theological choice as much as an aesthetic one, and a team ought to notice it before they decide how they feel about the shirt.

The Objection Worth Taking Seriously

The honest objection to a shirt like this is not that it is too strong. It is that it is too easy. Hatred is a cheap emotion to print. Anyone can hate something. The question a pastor has to ask is whether the sentence on the chest is matched by anything in the life behind it.

That is not a critique of this shirt. It is a critique of the gap between what we print and how we live, and the shirt simply makes the gap visible. A congregation can wear a declaration like this and still treat its own people with contempt. The shirt does not close that gap. It only makes it harder to ignore.

So the useful question for a volunteer team is not is this too much? It is what would have to be true of us for this sentence to be honest? That is a question you can actually discuss in a forty-minute meeting. The other one just produces heat.

A Conversation You Can Actually Hold

If a team wants to work through this — whether because someone wore it, someone objected to it, or someone is thinking about ordering it for a youth trip — I would structure the conversation around three plain questions rather than a debate about taste.

First: what is the enemy, concretely? The shirt names Satan. In practice, church people use that word to mean very different things — a personal adversary, a system of injustice, a pattern of sin, a rival faction, or simply the person they are angry with this month. A team that cannot distinguish those uses will weaponize the shirt without meaning to. Naming the enemy plainly is only useful if you are also willing to name what you are not calling the enemy.

Second: what does the cross do in the sentence? The small cross is not decoration. It locates the hatred inside a story where the outcome is already settled. A team that talks about the shirt without talking about the cross is talking about a different object. Ask what it means that the symbol is smaller than the words — and whether that is a design choice the team is comfortable with, or one it would want to see reversed.

Third: who is this for? A shirt like this is not an invitation. It is a statement, and statements are read differently by the person already inside the faith and the person standing outside it. A volunteer team does not have to agree on whether that is good. It does have to be honest that the shirt is not trying to reach the outsider in the same way a Come and see shirt would. Pretending otherwise is where teams get into trouble.

What I Would Not Do

I would not put this shirt on a visitor-facing ministry table and call it evangelism. The design is not built for that, and asking it to be something it isn’t will only produce confusion. I would not hand it to a teenager without a conversation, because the sentence is strong enough that it will be read as a personality before it is read as a theology. And I would not use it as a shortcut for the harder work of naming real conflict inside the congregation. A shirt cannot do that work. It can only announce that someone believes the work matters.

What I would do is let the shirt be what it is: a blunt, first-person declaration with a cross attached, sold as ordinary apparel. It is not a program. It is not a curriculum. It is a sentence someone chose to print, and the only question that matters for a church team is whether the sentence is true of them in a way they could defend at the next board meeting — not just on a Sunday morning in the parking lot.

So here is the question I would leave with you: if someone in your congregation wore this shirt to the fellowship hall next week, would the conversation that followed be about the shirt, or about the thing the shirt is trying to name? And which of those conversations does your team actually need to have?

JESUS IS MY SUPERHERO. The words run across the chest in comic-book lettering, the kind of blocky, outlined type that belongs on a Saturday-morning cartoon or a cereal box. Beneath the words, a gold cross wears a red cape. The cape flares to one side, caught mid-snap, as if the cross has just landed on a rooftop or is about to take off. That is the whole design. No verse reference, no church name, no additional slogan. Just the claim, the cross, and the cape.

I keep coming back to that cape. A cross is an instrument of execution. A cape is what a child ties around their neck before leaping off the porch. Putting the two together is either the most theologically careless thing a shirt can do or the most precise thing a children’s shirt can do, and I think it depends entirely on who is doing the looking.

This is a children’s shirt. The listing calls it Jesus Is My Superhero Christian Kids Girls Boys Faith, and the design is sized and styled for kids. That matters for the argument I want to make, because the shirt is not asking a forty-seven-year-old deacon to reconsider his Christology. It is asking a six-year-old to say something true with the vocabulary she already has. And the vocabulary of a six-year-old in 2026 is saturated with capes.

What the cape is doing

I want to be careful here, because I am not a semiotician and I am not going to pretend the shirt has a hidden theology. What I can say is what I see. The cross is gold, which in the visual language of children’s merchandise signals value, treasure, something worth noticing. The cape is red, the color of every superhero costume from the 1930s forward. The lettering is comic-style, which places the whole thing in the genre of adventure rather than the genre of Sunday school handout. The design is not asking a child to be reverent. It is asking a child to be excited.

That is a real choice, and it is not the only choice available. A children’s faith shirt could print a Bible verse in a soft serif font on a pastel background. It could print a dove or a lamb or a mustard seed. Those are all fine. But this shirt has decided that the first thing a child should associate with Jesus is power on behalf of someone else. The cape is not a cape of domination. It is the cape of the one who shows up. That is a distinction I would want a volunteer team to name out loud, because children will ask.

The question a child will ask

Here is the conversation I would want a children’s ministry volunteer to be ready for. A child wears the shirt to church or to school. Another child reads it and says, “Superheroes fight bad guys. Who does Jesus fight?” That is not a hostile question. It is a genuinely good question, and it deserves a better answer than “Jesus fights the devil,” which is true in a Sunday-school sense but tends to land as a cartoon with a red villain and a lot of smoke.

The better answer, I think, is that Jesus fights the things that hurt people. He fights sickness, and loneliness, and hunger, and the fear that keeps a child awake at night. He fights death itself, and he does it not with a laser beam but by going through it. That is the strange thing about the cross wearing a cape. The cross is where the hero loses, and then the story says he didn’t. If a volunteer can hold that tension for a child without resolving it too quickly, the shirt has done its job.

I am not suggesting a curriculum. I am suggesting that a volunteer team sit down for twenty minutes before the fall quarter and ask: if a child wears this shirt and a friend asks what it means, what do we want that child to say? Write the answer on a index card. Keep it in the supply closet. That is the whole exercise.

What the shirt is not

I want to be plain about one thing. The shirt does not teach doctrine. It does not explain the atonement. It does not replace a children’s catechism or a Sunday school lesson or a parent reading Scripture at bedtime. It is a piece of cotton with a picture on it. The work of formation happens in rooms with tables and chairs and a patient adult who knows the child’s name.

But that is exactly why the shirt is worth a conversation. Children’s clothing is one of the few places where a child gets to choose what they are publicly associated with. A six-year-old does not pick the family car or the church budget or the sermon series. She picks the shirt. And when she picks the one with the cross and the cape, she is making a small, public, entirely age-appropriate declaration: this is mine, and I am not embarrassed by it. That is not nothing. That is the beginning of a habit.

The gold cross and the red cape

I keep thinking about the gold. Gold crosses are usually jewelry, the kind of thing a grandmother wears. Putting a gold cross on a children’s t-shirt and giving it a cape is a small act of visual mischief. It takes an object associated with solemnity and makes it kinetic. The cross is not sitting still. It is moving. It is going somewhere.

That is the image I would leave with a volunteer team. Not a static symbol to be admired but a moving one to be followed. The shirt does not say Jesus is my statue. It says Jesus is my superhero, which is a child’s way of saying Jesus is the one who acts. If a child wears that shirt long enough, the hope is that the grammar of the sentence sinks in: not just that Jesus is strong, but that Jesus is strong for me, and that the strength is aimed at the things that frighten me.

I do not know whether the shirt will last through a growth spurt or a summer of creek wading. Most children’s shirts do not. But the sentence is short enough to remember, and the picture is simple enough to redraw from memory. That is a decent test for any piece of children’s discipleship material, whether it costs twelve dollars or comes in a box with a leader guide.

One question for the team

Before the next quarter starts, gather the children’s volunteers in the fellowship hall and put the shirt on the table. Ask them: if a child in our care wore this to school and a classmate asked what it meant, what would we want that child to say? Write the answers down. You will learn more about your team’s theology from that exercise than from most of the curriculum you could buy.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. This is not an independent review.

The shirt is available at the Quirky Cotton Collective listing on Amazon.